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Published last week, Lee Siegel's newest book, Love and the Incredibly Old Man: A Novel scores a long and appreciative review in the April 18th edition of the Times Literary Supplement. Remarking on the unique autobiographical element of Siegel's fiction Stephen Burn's article begins:

Students of American writing have to distinguish between two Lee Siegels. Perhaps the more famous of the two is the New York critic Siegel, who was suspended from the New Republic in 2006 when it was discovered that he had been posting comments on the internet proclaiming his own brilliance. Oddly enough, the other, currently less famous Siegel—who is a professor of religion at the University of Hawaii—has also spent the last ten years writing about himself. His four inventive and amusing novels feature a character, Lee Siegel, who, the author complains, "has consistently tried to pass himself off as me."…

His new novel, Love and the Incredibly Old Man, belongs somewhere in the middle of a continuum running from the experiments of his first two novels to the more transparent style of Who Wrote the Book of Love?, but like all the earlier works it involves a story received from an old man. In this instance the elderly gentleman is extremely elderly: he claims to be Ponce de Léon who, having lived on the waters of the Fountain of Youth for nearly 500 years, now seeks a ghostwriter to record his story before he dies. Having been impressed by references to Ponce in Siegel's fiction, the conquistador hires the novelist to write his life.…

Siegel's achievement is to persuade the reader to care about such a self-involved, and possibly delusional character while staging jokes at his expense and displaying his own verbal dexterity. A creative attitude to the novel is in abundant evidence across all Siegel's fiction; and this new novel is a worthy addition to a body of work which deserves a wider audience.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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What Herman Melville did for the whale, Lee Siegel did for the Kama Sutra with his first critically acclaimed and enormously successful novel, Love in a Dead Language. Here Lee Siegel—no not THAT Lee Siegel, this is the other Lee Seigel, the nice Lee Siegel, the novelist, magician, and sex obsessed Lee Siegel—does the same for eternal love. The premise of this gem of a book is this: down on his luck in both letters and love, a reluctant Lee Siegel is summoned to a remote south Florida town by the conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon, who contrary to both history and legend not only discovered the Fountain of Youth, but has savored its waters for the past 540 years. But Ponce de Leon’s time is short—and it’s his dying wish that Lee Siegel ghostwrite his autobiography, chronicling his numerous romantic conquests, exploits, and misadventures. The result is everything readers have come to expect from this Lee Siegel: a tender, witty, and salacious picaresque of sorts that falls somewhere between Don Quixote, Don Juan, and in a perverse sort of way, Don DeLillo in its evocation of empire’s twilight, the lure of the libertine, and one hopeless romantic’s eternal quest for the ideal. Comic, lusty, and fully engaged with the act of invention, whether in love or on the page, Love and the Incredibly Old Man continues this Lee Siegel’s exuberant exploration of that sentiment which Ponce de Leon confesses has “transported me to the most joyous heights, plunged me to the most dismal depths, and dropped me willy-nilly and dumbfounded at all places in between.”

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
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Germany’s leading literary family during the 20th century was headed by Thomas Mann and composed of six talented children, the most accomplished of which were Erika and Klaus. Long obscured by the fame of their domineering father, Erika and Klaus were prominent writers and artists in their own right who led fascinating, unconventional lives that mirrored the tumult and chaos of their times. In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain is their story. Andrea Weiss’s remarkable biography chronicles Erika and Klaus’s equally remarkable lives. Openly gay during an era of secrecy and repression; defiantly anti-fascist during the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich; intimate friends with such luminaries as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau; performance artists before the phrase had even been coined, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain is rich in anecdote and eye-opening details, sending the reader spinning and tumbling into the minds of these two extraordinary but neglected literary figures.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Press Releases
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Bernard Lightman's Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences is a fascinating study of the work of some of the most influential expositors of scientific doctrine during the 19th century—though they are rarely credited as such. The names of the popular science writers of the Victorian era are often overshadowed by those of the scientists they wrote about, but as Jon Turney notes in a recent review for the Times Higher Education, in his new book Lightman skillfully illuminates their cultural and historical importance. Turney writes:

The Victorian explosion of print embraced a diversity of treatments of science and its significance that exhibits many of the tensions that still mark science in public. Who has the right to speak for science, to interpret nature or to have the final word on humans' place in a universe in which God's hand in creation is in question?

As he catalogues the many contributors to the new popular scientific literature, and their works, Lightman illuminates how the different answers to these questions played their part in battles over science's authority and cultural prestige.…

Throughout, Lightman pays detailed attention to publishers and print runs, as well as to the authors' lives and works. The book is a substantial work of scholarship rather than a casual read, and it offers much for historians of science as well as students of popular writing.

Read the rest of the review on the THE website.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Literature | Reviews
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German intellectual Thomas Mann left behind not only the legacy of his extraordinary literary career, but six children who—though often overshadowed by their father's fame—became literary and artistic figures in their own right. In her new book In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story Andrea Weiss delivers a dual biography of Mann's two eldest, Erika and Clause, whose literary, political, and artistic exploits she recounts in vivid detail. In a review running in the April edition of Harper's, John Leonard notes that in delivering its candid portrait of the Mann children's dramatic lives, the book also provides a revealing look inside the elite literary and artistic circles which the Mann children traversed. Leonard writes:

The years of exile, war, and America are an extravagance of highbrow gossip, with such raisins in the cake as André Gide, Bertolt Brecht, Sybille Bedford, Jean Cocteau, Stefan Zweig, Muriel Rukeyser, Christopher Isherwood, Janet Flanner, James Baldwin, and Carson McCullers. Erika wrote magazine articles and children's books; Klaus wrote novels, plays, and film scripts; and the two of them collaborated on travel books, all while the FBI and the INS were hot on their trail for "premature anti-Fascism."

Pick up the current issue of Harper's to find out more, or read an excerpt.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Reviews
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In a short review running in the April edition of the Atlantic Monthly reviewer Peter Hoey praises Richard B. Sher's The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America for its revealing account of the essential role publishers played in fostering the explosion of intellectual activity in Enlightenment Europe:

The marriage of commerce and culture is always fraught with difficulties, but when it works, its issue can indeed be remarkable. Nowhere was this truer than in Scotland during the late 18th century, when such writers as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns worked in creative cooperation with their equally enlightened publishers, disseminating their revolutionary works throughout Britain, Europe and most tellingly, the Americas. Discerningly illustrated, at once scholarly and accessible, this is an essential addition not only to 18th-century studies but also to the history of the book—a poignant subject in our post-book age.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Literature | Reviews
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Consistently an outsider—a child of the fundamentalist South with an eighth-grade education, a self-taught intellectual, a black man married to a white woman—Richard Wright nonetheless became the unparalleled voice of his time. The first full-scale biography of the author best known for his searing novels Black Boy and Native Son, Richard Wright: The Life and Times brings the man and his work—in all their complexity and distinction—to vibrant life. Acclaimed biographer Hazel Rowley chronicles Wright's unprecedented journey from a sharecropper's shack in Mississippi to Chicago's South Side to international renown as a writer and outspoken critic of racism.

Drawing on journals, letters, and eyewitness accounts, Richard Wright probes the author's relationships with Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison, his attraction to Communism, and his so-called exile in France. Skillfully interweaving quotes from Wright's own writings, Rowley deftly portrays a passionate, courageous, and flawed man who would become one of our most enduring literary figures.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | Black Studies | History | Literature | Press Releases
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Another review from the Times Literary Supplement: in the January 4 edition Peter Hainsworth takes on two recent translations of twentieth century Italian poetry, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto and The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni—both are the first substantial translations of these masters of Italian poetry for English speaking audiences.

In the review Hainsworth delivers an enthusiastic appraisal of the two works:

Sereni and Zanzotto … embraced negatives and contradictions more wholeheartedly and more energetically than … the poets of the previous generation.… The result in both cases is a particularly adventurous and exciting body of work, constantly in evolution, sometimes (especially in the case of Zanzotto) on the edge of flamboyant avant-gardism, but somehow generally able to keep its poetic balance. What also gives both poets and others of their generation substance is the fact that they have something to say. Sereni's mature poetry is constantly probing issues of commitment, choice and understanding, often through a multiplicity of voices, criss-crossing and overlaying each other, with back references to his favorite poets or his own previous work.… They represent and enact the often dramatic confrontation of differing, often irreconcilable viewpoints and constantly changing perspectives.

Zanzotto's dizzying changes of tack and tone between nonsense, parody, and high literariness are similarly rooted in the sense of things being impossible to pin down in words, but take on concrete urgency through being clustered around a host of contemporary issues (ranging from war and environmental degradation to school teaching and lunar exploration).

Find out more about the work of these two remarkable poets on the UCP website:

The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto: A Bilingual Edition

The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni: A Bilingual Edition

Archived in Literature | Poetry | Reviews
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In a book we published a few years back, British classicist Simon Goldhill explained the Greek and Roman roots of everything in contemporary Western culture, from our political systems to the quest for the perfect body. Still, we have traveled some ways from those classic roots, which perhaps accounts for why the works of Greek dramatists can seem so ancient and foreign when performed on a modern stage. Most of the action takes place offstage, the characters do more speechifying than dialogue, and a chorus shuffles on and off.

Goldhill's latest book, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, tackles this problem. Writing in a Commentary magazine blog, the Horizon, drama critic Terry Teachout discussed the book last week. Teachout noted that "most contemporary productions of Greek tragedy are exercises in theatrical futility" and summed up Goldhill's contribution:

His approach is at once deeply informed by the best academic scholarship and no less deeply rooted in a commonsense understanding of what works on stage. The result is one of the most instructive and lucidly written books about theater to have been published in recent years. No one whose interest in drama is more than merely casual should pass it by.

Archived in Classics | Literature | Reviews
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Francis Ford Coppola's newest film, Youth Without Youth, opened on both coasts last Friday. The film is based on the book of the same name written by Mircea Eliade, who was a professor in the history of religions at the University of Chicago. The first paperback edition of Youth Without Youth features a new foreword by Coppola.

Bookforum has an interview with the director that makes some interesting comparisons between the film and the book. Coppola discusses his decision to adapt the book for the big screen:

Originally, for another project, I had been thinking about the twin challenge of cinematic language, which is the expression and manipulation of time while finding ways to try and tap into our unique human consciousness. It's hard to explain it, but we all kind of know what it is: that little thing in your head that seems to be you, through which you see all your experience and feel your emotion. A lot of filmmakers in the past, even the great Sergei Eisenstein, had thought about the representation of human consciousness. He wrote about it in the second of his books [Film Form (1949)], I think. A friend of mine who was an Orientalist and a scholar pointed me to some quotes from Mircea Eliade, whom I didn't know much about. I read some of these references, which ultimately led me to this novella. And it was a hell of a thing. It surprised me at every turn: Just when I'd think I got the story, it would turn a new page. It starts off with this lightning strike. And then he's rejuvenated. And suddenly he's talking to his double. And then the Nazis are after him. And he meets this woman who seems to be the reincarnated figure of an ancient Indian nun. I kept thinking, "What next?" I felt it could be made into a film that could be enjoyed on first viewing as a surprising story, but then you could see it again and find things to ruminate on more, about our perception of reality. Given my age and where I was at the time, I found myself with the opportunity to just go off and make it and not even tell anyone that I was making it.

Manohla Dargis reviewed the film last Friday in the New York Times. You can read the review and view a slideshow and the trailer for the film on their website. But take heed of the note about the film's rating at the end of the review:

"Youth Without Youth is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence, sexual congress, female nudity, metaphysics."

Ah, metaphysics. We have the opening pages of the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
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When Frances Ford Coppola was first introduced to Youth Without Youth by his former high school classmate and University of Chicago professor Wendy Doniger, he was inspired to make his first film in ten years. Mircea Eliade's novella, now a major motion picture from Sony Pictures Classics, lies at the intersection of the natural and supernatural, myth and history, dream and science. The psychological thriller features an elderly academic who experiences a cataclysmic transformation that endows him with prodigious powers of memory and comprehension. Sought by the Nazis for medical experiments on the potentially life-prolonging power of electric shocks, Matei flees through Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India in a surreal fantasy that tests the boundaries of genre and imagination.

Read the press release. Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
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The Literary Review is currently running a piece on Simon Goldhill's new book, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today. As the Review's Fiona Macintosh notes, with new productions of Greek drama flooding the world of theater, Goldhill's book makes a timely effort to address the challenges involved in updating these ancient masterpieces for the modern stage. Macintosh writes:

Since the 1960s there has been an explosion in the number of performances of ancient plays not just in Europe, but increasingly across the globe—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In many ways, Goldhill's new book is a response to this phenomenon. As he explains, directors or actors who are about to work with a Greek play regularly turn to scholars of ancient tragedy for assistance; and one frequent question concerns what they should read. Goldhill says his book grew out of one such query from Vanessa Redgrave, when she was having a difficult time in West End as the eponymous heroine of Euripides' Hecuba, with a director she couldn't abide and in a part which had just been played superlatively by Claire Higgins at the Donmar Warehouse…

The review continues:

As one would expect from Goldhill, author of a number of respected discussions of Greek tragedy, the sections on the individual plays are lucid and highly informative. There are also particularly important caveats for the theater practitioner.… However, it is not just the would-be practitioner who could benefit from reading this book: there are equally good nuggets for the seasoned scholar of Greek tragedy. None better, perhaps, than this one concerning the theatrical genre that has drained more ink down the centuries than any other: 'Tragedy is a genre of conflict, not only between people or between ideas, but also conflict about what words mean.' With a definition of tragedy as succinct and incisive as this one, some might even be tempted to adopt this definition and cast the notoriously open-ended Aristotelian one to the wind.

Archived in Classics | History | Literature | Reviews
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The Sacramento Theatre Company reimagines Euripides' Electra as Electricidad, while off-Broadway's Signature Theatre puts on Iphigenia 2.0 and an Indian director stages Raja Oedipus, an adaptation of the famous Sophocles play featuring Karbi gods and goddesses in place of the original Greek deities: if you've seen any of these recent performances—or one of their countless counterparts on stages across the globe—you've experienced the timelessness, renewed popularity, and ever-broadening reach of Greek tragedy. But how are today's productions different from their ancient peers? What are the best strategies for interpreting these dramas on contemporary stages? In this follow-up to his acclaimed Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes our Lives, renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds to these questions (and many others) with his long-awaited guide How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today.

Read the press release.

Archived in Classics | Education | History | Literature | Press Releases
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It's the late 1960s. You're nine years old, living in Bombay, and your family is a bit … complicated. Your mother was born in America, but she has fully adopted Indian dress, customs, and attitudes. Your Indian father, meanwhile, is cynical, worldly, and deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of mysticism or religion—which includes much of Indian culture. Then, out of the blue, your sixteen-year-old brother announces that he's leaving home to go live with a guru and become holy. How on earth are you supposed to go about the business of growing up in such a complicated family?

With My Family and Other Saints, Kirin Narayan shows us how. Her funny, touching memoir tells the story of her brother's quest and its effects, revealing a family full of love, yet always on the verge of disintegration. As their house becomes a waystation for the army of hippies, gurus, and charlatans flooding India, Narayan also brings late-60s Bombay to life, taking us back to a time and place when nearly everyone, it seemed, was embarked on some sort of spiritual quest and Western seekers were obsessed with all things Indian, from yoga to transcendental meditation. Deeply moving, yet frequently hilarious, My Family and Other Saints is a poignant reminder of both the power and the frailty of family bonds in turbulent times.

Read the press release. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Literature | Press Releases | Religion
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Now available in paperback— With all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics, Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in the age of information is not stuff but style. In such an age, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world—masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Literature | Press Releases
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Readers who denounce most contemporary French poetry as self-referential experimentation, word games, exercises in deconstruction, or other kinds of incomprehensible writing disconnected from everyday life—brace yourselves for a revelation. Erotic and urbane, distinguished by formal skill yet marked by the subtlest shades of feeling, Guy Goffette’s unabashedly lyrical poems pay homage to both Verlaine and Rimbaud, whom he counts as his important forbears, with echoes of Auden and Pound, Pavese and Borges.

Long known and admired in France, Guy Goffette’s Charlestown Blues: Selected Poems, a Bilingual Edition is the first English-language collection of his works. Poet and translator Marilyn Hacker’s crystalline, musical renderings will show Anglophones why this poet is considered one of the most important writing in French today.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
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In Search of Lost Time has enthralled lovers of literature for nearly a century. But for diehard fans, its seven volumes are never enough: Proust fans also devour biographies of this most enigmatic of writers, tap guidebooks to navigate his magnum opus, and even sponsor book clubs devoted to plumbing its considerable depths. Here National Book Award nominee Alice Kaplan offers Proust fans the gift they've long been waiting for: a crystalline translation of Madame Proust, the enthralling biography of Proust's mother.

Written by Evelyne Bloch-Dano and originally published in France to lavish critical acclaim, Madame Proust: A Biography explores how Marcel's mother both inspired and informed his legendary novel. Renowned both jokingly and lovingly as the quintessential mama's boy of all of modern literature, Proust was dramatically influenced by his mother, Jeanne Weil, and this intimate portrait of her life and times reveals precisely how, limning their unusually close bonds and the fin de siècle French milieu in which they lived.

Read the press release. Read a chapter from the book, “The Goodnight Kiss.”

Archived in Biography | Literature | Press Releases
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Our books are not often reviewed in Jordanian newspapers. In fact, we can't remember the last time. So it was a treat to see Joseph A. Massad's new book Desiring Arabs receiving some positive press in Monday's Jordan Times. Writer Sally Bland praises Massad's book for its detailed analysis of the influence of Western culture on Middle Eastern sexual mores through a comprehensive survey of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present. Bland writes:

The material reviewed by Massad is amazingly comprehensive, covering a time span of over a century and all major schools of thought from Arab nationalist to Marxist to Islamic. Their writings come in many forms and genres—academic, literary, journalistic and theological—and touch on many subjects related to sexuality, such as heritage, women's status, health issues and how state policy has dealt with "deviance."

Like Massad's two previous books, Desiring Arabs is meticulously researched and documented, using a broad spectrum of Arabic, English and French sources. Touching on so many disciplines as it does, the book inspires—or provokes—a radically new way of looking at human identity, culture and social behaviour, in part based on a more objective assessment of the past.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Reviews
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Stuart Dybek, currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University is one of twenty four academics to be awarded a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship. Dybek, born and raised in the Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods, is the author of several books of poetry and three short story collections. We re-printed his first collection of stories, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a short piece this morning giving more details about the award:

MacArthur fellows were called out of the blue and told they each will receive a $500,000 no-strings-attached grant over five years.

Dybek, 65, said the grant "couldn't have come at a better time." By freeing him from having to take side jobs, the money will give Dybek time to finish three books.… A book of poems set in the Caribbean, a collection of short stories set in Chicago and other places, and a memoir.

We can't wait to see more work from one of Chicago's best homegrown authors!

Find out more about Dybek's Childhood and Other Neighborhoods on the press website.

Archived in Awards | Literature
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The online literary magazine Bookslut is running a nice review of Evelyn Bloch-Dano's forthcoming book, Madame Proust: A Biography. The mother of one of the nineteenth century's most important novelists, Jeanne Weil Proust was a profound influence on her son's life and writing. But as Bookslut reviewer Aysha Somasundaram notes, Bloch-Dano's new book goes beyond the typical focus of most biographies to deliver a thorough account of the social and cultural milieu in which Proust's masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, was written. Somasundaram writes:

Meticulously researched, Madame Proust offers a socio-cultural portrait of French and Jewish culture and how each intersected in Proust's lifetime. It not only explores Anti-Semitism, assimilation and naturalization of Jewish French Nationals and the Dreyfus affair but also ably recreates the bourgeois milieu, familial and cultural context and the physical lay-out of the Paris in which Marcel Proust lived. Marcel Proust was the product of an arranged marriage between an affluent Jewish mother and upwardly mobile Catholic father.…

Bloch-Dano's biography offers a sensitive, delicate evocation of the relationship Proust would describe as his life's "only purpose, its only sweetness, its only love, its only consolation." Madame Proust is a well-conceived and insightful tribute to a woman who lived quietly and whose ambitions and hopes centered fixedly on her family's well-being and her son's fulfillment.

Read an excerpt, "The Goodnight Kiss".

The official publication date for Madame Proust: A Biography is October 1 of this year.

Archived in Biography | Literature | Reviews
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A review in the September 12 New York Sun focuses on author Vicki Hearne's (1946–2001) double life as an assistant professor of English at Yale and a "respected horse and dog trainer;" two worlds which Hearne brings together in an unusual and fascinating way with her newest work, posthumously published by the press, Tricks of the Light: New and Selected Poems. Louisa Thomas writes for the Sun:

Vicki Hearne was taken seriously in both the academy and in the kennels where she spent much of her time. But she was not wholly at home in either. As she wrote in her book Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name, "Dog trainers and philosophers can't make much sense of each other." The trainers talk about animals in anthropomorphized language, whereas philosophers tend to assume that only humans are truly moral creatures. Ms. Hearne spent much of her time trying to bridge the gap—to build off of what the philosophers say about consciousness and the trickeries of language, while vigorously defending the idea that animals are in on the game.

This is the task of her poetry as well as her prose. Ms. Hearne is less well known as a poet, but she is a skilled practitioner, and her subject is well-suited to verse. Her talent is plainly clear in her posthumous collection of new and selected poems, Tricks of the Light … edited by her longtime friend and champion, the critic and poet John Hollander.

Read the rest of the review on the New York Sun website.

Archived in Literature | Poetry | Reviews
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New York Times film critic A. O. Scott wrote a lovely article for last Sunday's paper about Francis Ford Coppola's forthcoming film adaptation of Youth Without Youth—a surreal, philosophy-driven novella by Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)—the University of Chicago professor whose writings in the history of religions defined the field. Scott's article begins:

Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola's first film in 10 years, is about Dominic Matei, an elderly Romanian professor of linguistics who, after being struck by lightning, becomes young again. Though Matei, played by Tim Roth, retains a septuagenarian's memories and experiences, his body, restored to 30-year-old fighting trim, is mysteriously immune to the effects of time.

The professor's condition is presented as a medical curiosity and a metaphysical conundrum—like the novella by Mircea Eliade on which it is based, Mr. Coppola's movie is a complex, symbol-laden meditation on the nature of chronology, language, and human identity—but it also speaks to a familiar and widespread longing. What if, without losing the hard-won wisdom of age, you could go back and start again? What if you could reverse and arrest the process of growing old, securing the double blessing of a full past and a limitless future?

Coinciding with the film's international premiere at the Rome Film Fest, the Press will be releasing the first paperback edition of Eliade's novel in late October featuring a new foreword by Coppola himself. The U. S. release of the film is scheduled for December. In the meantime you can find the official website for the film at http://www.ywyfilm.com/. You can also view a trailer at rottentomatoes.com.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
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Eric Santner's new book On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, recently received an enthusiastic review by Ross Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement. Wilson's review begins:

What is life? What kind of beings are human beings? Despite their forbidding enormity, these questions have received sustained scrutiny in contemporary political theory, philosophy, literary theory, and criticism.… Eric L. Santner's fascinating, difficult book is a significant contribution to this attempt to specify what is human about human life and, indeed, what is meant by "life" to begin with.

Ross not only praises Santner's book as "the most urgently relevant sort of intellectual history" but explains its relation to the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and provides a lucid gloss of its main arguments:

"Creaturely life" is not simple biological life, then, but the "zero degree of social existence"; it is that minimum of human life, closest to animal life, which is caught up in the antagonisms of the political."

Two years ago we posted an essay by Santner that offered a highly topical rehearsal of these ideas—an account of Terry Schiavo and Abu Ghraib as "two faces of the state of exception in which political power takes a direct hold on human life."

As Ross notes in his review, Santner's new book not only extends his earlier work on political theology, but shows how the great novelist W. G. Sebald "in particular, and literature in general, are especially suited to documenting the nature of creaturely life."

Archived in Literature | Philosophy | Reviews
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James Attlee's new book Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey received a positive review by Paul Kingsnorth in the Independent. Kingsnorth—an Oxford resident himself— writes:

Oxford's supposedly dreaming spires have been committed to print so often that you'd have thought there'd be nothing we don't know about the city now. Yet James Attlee shows otherwise with a book about the last part of Oxford that remains colorful, wild, unpredictable and, for the moment, untouched by the dead hand of "regeneration."…

Its subject, the Cowley Road, … is a ramshackle, multicultural mélange, the old track through the marshes between Oxford and Cowley village, now home to a mix of races and religions, strung with halal butchers, flotation centers, porn shops and pawn brokers, Chinese herbalists, Caribbean fishmongers, Russian grocers, pubs and mosques.… It's my neighborhood, and I thought I knew it pretty well. But Isolarion has made me think, not just about local history and the hidden everyday, but about religion and philosophy, democracy and social change.

More than a day trip, Kingsnorth notes in Isolarion "Attlee's aim is to make a pilgrimage: 'Why make a journey to the other side of the world when the world has come to you?'… Attlee captures the essence of this city better than any tour bus ever could."

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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Last Friday's New York Times had a review of an exhibition at the SculptureCenter. The exhibition drew inspiration from a book that the Press recently honored, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images by W. J. T. Mitchell. Martha Schwendener writes for the NYT:

What do objects want? The question, immediately recalling Freud's about women, also paraphrases the title of W. J. T. Mitchell's book What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, the inspiration for an exhibition at the SculptureCenter in Long Island City, Queens.

Mr. Mitchell, a professor at the University of Chicago and editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, observes that "modern, rational, secular" people don't generally treat pictures like persons, yet "we always seem to be willing to make exceptions for special cases." (Most of us, for instance, would be reluctant to poke out the eyes on a photograph of our mother.) But pictures have desires, too, he argues, and a primary one is the desire to capture our attention—to "transfix the beholder" and gain some measure of mastery or power over us.

The Happiness of Objects, organized by Sarina Basta, the SculptureCenter curator, takes Mr. Mitchell's ideas and tweaks them to fit an exhibition of work by nearly two dozen artists and artist collectives. Visitors receive a handout titled "The Object's Bill of Rights," which lays out a series of demands like "The Object has the right to be claimed or forgotten, lost or found," and "The Object has the right to many lovers."

You can learn more about the show at the SculptureCenter website, or check out Mitchell's fascinating book, either way, your understanding of our increasingly visual culture is guaranteed to be transformed.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Literature
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We're catching it a little late, but last month the London Review of Books ran such an interesting review of Richard Sher's The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America that we thought it worth a mention. Sher brings to light the forgotten role of the publishing industry on the explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland during the eighteenth century, as reviewer James Buchan—a Scotch writer himself—explains:

For Sher, whether a piece of paper was folded into four to make a big square volume (quarto) or eight like a modern hardback (octavo) or 12 like a livre de poche (duodecimo), who printed a book and who sold it and for how much, how many editions a book went through and how much money the author or publisher made, whether there were engravings, frontispieces or printed advertisements—all those have important things to tell us about works such as Hume's Essays and Treatises, his country and his age [and] as befits such an argument Sher's book is beautifully illustrated.

"Even among bibliographers and book historians who specialize in the 18th-century book trade," Sher writes, "relatively little work has been done to connect publishers and the conditions of publication with the authors and their books. One of the primary tasks of this book is to re-establish that connection." For Sher, the Scottish printers and booksellers of the second half of the century … were not 'mechanicks' … but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that put Scotland on the literary map.

Read an excerpt from the book.

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The May 9 Sydney Morning Herald includes an excellent review of James Attlee's new book, Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey. Praising Attlee for his ability to transform a seemingly mundane trip down Oxford's Cowley Road—a side-street just minutes from the author's doorstep—into a fascinating travelogue of his adventures through the exotic and the extraordinary, reviewer Bruce Elder writes:

Having lived in south Oxfordshire for seven years in the 1970s I have traveled up and down Oxford's Cowley Road, which runs from Magdalen Bridge to the famous Morris car works, literally thousands of times. In all those journeys, not once did it occur to me that the rich diversity of cafes, shops, pubs, galleries and houses would be the suitable subject for a travel book. What a great idea. …

Part of the appeal of this remarkable book is the way each shop manages to fire the author's imagination. Thus a visit to a jeweller includes references to Shakespeare, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Petrarch and Charlemagne and the porn shop on the corner evokes Lucretius, St Jerome and even the Bible. Each experience opens up worlds of associations and slowly the street becomes the world. Attlee describes in meticulous detail each place—right down to the misspellings on the walls—and thus the book becomes a series of vignettes connected by the road. In this he echoes the style adopted by Bruce Chatwin in his groundbreaking travel book In Patagonia. The vignettes, like marks on a painting by a pointillist, eventually coalesce to become a beautiful work of art.

Read an excerpt from the book.

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At its award ceremony on Monday, April 30, the University of Chicago Press awarded the 2006 Gordon J. Laing Prize to W. J. T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History, for his book What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images.

Awarded annually since 1963 by the Press, the Laing Prize is given to the Chicago faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the Press's list.

In What Do Pictures Want? Mitchell explores the idea that images are not just inert objects that convey meaning but animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. The book highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting.

Mitchell becomes only the third faculty member to win the Laing Prize twice; he also won the 1996 prize for Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation.

What Do Pictures Want? was also the co-winner of the 2006 James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Literature | UCP News
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John Patrick Diggins, author of Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire under Democracy—a fascinating biography of the preeminent American playwright Eugene O'Neill—recently published an essay adapted from his book in the May 4 Chronicle of Higher Education. Commenting on the broad applicability of O'Neill's plays to virtually all aspects of modern American life, Diggins writes:

O'Neill merits appreciation beyond the conventional categories of politics, the aesthetic criteria of dramaturgy, or the neurotic symptoms of psychology. Ideas pervade O'Neill's plays, and not only ideas central to drama like irony, pathos, and tragedy.… He considered fortuitous contingencies and unintended consequences; sympathy and pity; falls caused by pride or jealousy; social and political philosophy involving class, religion, gender, race, marriage and family, power and freedom, and money and status.

And as a recent review in the Library Journal notes, it is just this appreciation of the diverse thematic content in O'Neill's work that sets Diggins's biography apart.

Biographers have published dozens of books on Eugene O'Neill over the last 50 years in an attempt to explain the complexities of America's 20th-century 'master playwright.' What makes Diggins's thoroughly researched effort particularly effective is his use of political, philosophical, social, psychological, and religious themes in his discussion of O'Neill's life and plays in the context of a dynamic American society.… Diggins generously illustrates each theme with multiple examples from O'Neill's plays and correspondences. Particularly insightful are his comparisons of O'Neill's work with that of other great writers on the theme of American democracy, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Abraham Lincoln. This book offers the reader a lot to think about, regarding O'Neill's life and work but also American society at large.

Painting a richly detailed portrait of the playwright's life and work, Eugene O'Neill's America offers a striking view of America's greatest playwright—and an insightful picture of America itself.

Archived in Biography | History | Literature | Reviews
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Reviews of James Attlee's Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey have flooded the UK periodicals recently. Attlee's book is an engaging chronicle of his unusual pilgrimage down Oxford's Cowley Road—a bustling multi-ethnic side street not more than a few blocks from his own doorstep.

It's quite telling of the author's rhetorical prowess and insight that the his depiction of this decidedly lesser-known thoroughfare in his hometown has become such a a smash hit. Especially amongst so many of his fellow Brits who, before Attlee's book, probably never knew such a diamond in the rough existed, let alone right in their own back yards. (Or should that be "in their own gardens"? Or maybe "just beyond their gardens"?)

In the past ten days the book has received some outstanding reviews from the Times, the Financial Times, as well as the Spectator magazine. Here's a sampling of what the reviewers are saying:

“[Cowley Road] remains one of the last three Oxford thoroughfares with a bit of life in it. For the time being, before the rents shoot up and the developers triumph, it is where you go for foreign fruit, halal meat, exotic dry goods, cheaper domestic wares, direct calls to Dakkar, the Authentic Flavour of Kurdistan and 17 other lands, and all the amenities floating in the wake of the immigration quinquireme. As well as the sex shops, the postcard and stamp specialist, the hard-shell socialism, the Honest Stationery, and the sound of Urdu, Bengali, Chunga Chunga (fidget freezin’ crazy breakin’ funkin’ beats), and of Imperial Leisure (supported by Random Character and Drunken Uncle Bungle); not forgetting Inflatable Buddha. As [James Attlee] asks, ‘Why make a journey to the other side of the world when the world has come to you?’”
Eric Christiansen Spectator

“[Reading Attlee’s book], I often found myself thinking: ‘Hang on a minute. How did we get on to this?’ But seldom in a spirit of irritation, because the writing is so good: dildos of varying sizes are racked against the wall in a sex shop ‘like Kalashnikovs for sale on an Afghan market stall.’ Attlee comes across as a charming daydreamer, with a mind ever open to serendipity: ‘I have a theory that the discarded newspaper often contains more interesting news than the one purchased in the normal way.’”
Andrew Martin Times

“Isolarion, despite its title, is about engagement. I want to hand out copies of this book to everyone who tells me that moving to a middle-class suburb would be ‘better’ for my inner-city children. Attlee shows the hidden beauty of the plural society: ‘To put it simply, this is what I love about the moment in history I inhabit.’”
Isabel Berwick Financial Times

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene O’Neill’s plays reveal an America many would like to ignore, a place of seething resentments, aching desires, and family tragedy, where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera. Though derided by critics during his lifetime, his works resonated with audiences, won him the Nobel Prize and four Pulitzer, and continue to grip theatergoers today. Now in Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire Under Democracy noted historian John Patrick Diggins offers a masterly biography that both traces O’Neill’s tumultuous life and explains the forceful ideas that form the heart of his unflinching works.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | History | Literature | Press Releases
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A capstone to the career of a giant in Shakespearean scholarship, This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now is the first book of its kind: an utterly accessible history of how the works of Shakespeare have been performed, from the Renaissance right up to the present—and even on the silver screen by such directors as Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and Kenneth Branagh. The world’s leading expert on the subject, Bevington moves from the sparse stage sets of Elizabethan playhouses to the spectacular visual effects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century productions to the present, which has seen companies employ far more understated approaches, emphasizing character and language in a manner much closer to Shakespeare’s own aims. Bringing a lifetime of study to bear on a remarkably underappreciated aspect of Shakespeare's art, Bevington has crafted a book that will enthrall newcomers and aficionados alike.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
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Another Chicago book has found its way into the New York Times, only this time it wasn't among the usual Sunday book reviews, instead it was hiding out in the travel section of the paper. Reviewing Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey, for the NYT's "Armchair Traveler" column, Richard B. Woodward gives a nice account of the making of James Attlee's unconventional new travelogue:

Stricken with ennui during commutes to his publishing job in London, [Attlee] was tempted to set out on an adventure far outside cellphone range of his wife and children. Instead, he put his tape recorder in his pocket, walked out the front door, and embarked on a voyage around his Oxford neighborhood.

"Why make a journey to the other side of the world when the world has come to you," he reasons. Recording not the hallowed academic haven of dreaming spires, but the more recent and fractious multicultural city, he decides that this less venerated England is best seen on Cowley Road, an ancient thoroughfare that once led pilgrims from the colleges to a medieval healing well, and is now home to immigrants from five continents.

As a document of the author's fascinating journey, Isolarion takes its readers down one of the lesser known back streets of Oxford, a place just minutes from Attlee's own home, but one that he reveals to be just as exciting and full of surprises as a trip around the world.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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David Bevington's new book This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now was recently noted by the New York Times' William Grimes in his comprehensive review of "a stack of Shakespeare books released to coincide with the playwright's birthday on April 23." Though Bevington's book is set amongst some tough competition, as Grimes notes, his book stands out for its detailed study of the performance of Shakespeare's plays. Grimes writes:

Mr. Bevington, by focusing on the stage directions in Shakespeare's plays, shows how actors relied on words alone to suggest time, place and action, and how the stage at the Globe could be manipulated in the hands of a canny playwright. There was no balcony in "Romeo and Juliet." On the other hand, since there was nothing in the way of stage décor, no intervals were needed to move from scene to scene. More recent directors, returning to Shakespeare's idea of staging, have embraced abstract spaces and let the language do the work.

Examining the performance of Shakespeare's art both in his own time and in the succeeding centuries, David Bevington's This Wide and Universal Theater is an essential addition to any Shakespeare lover's bookshelf.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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Greg Bottoms, author of The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art has an interesting essay about his new book on the website of the New York Foundation for the Arts. The essay touches on some of his experiences in writing The Colorful Apocalypse as well as his motivations for undertaking this nuanced study of Christian outsider art.

The Reverend Howard Finster was twenty feet tall, suspended in darkness. Or so he appeared in the documentary film that introduced a teenaged Greg Bottoms to the renowned outsider artist whose death would help inspire him, fourteen years later, to travel the country. Beginning in Georgia with a trip to Reverend Howard Finster's famous Paradise Gardens, his journey—of which The Colorful Apocalypse is a masterly chronicle—is an unparalleled look into the lives and visionary works of self-taught evangelical artists whose beliefs and works occupy the gray area between madness and Christian ecstasy.

We also have an interview with the author and an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
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From the UK comes another review of Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey by James Attlee, this one in the Times. The review praises Attlee's unconventional travelogue for turning his observations about Oxford's Cowley Road—an unexplored side-street just minutes from the author's home—into a fascinating journey across space and time. From Elizabeth Garner's review:

On the surface, Isolarion plays with the thrill of voyeurism. We follow Attlee behind closed doors into unknown worlds: from New Age immersion in a flotation tank to the brash neon-lit world of the porn shop, to the smoky, hypnotic experience of a reggae concert. …

But Isolarion is more than a piece of observational journalism. Attlee's encounters lead to thoughtful investigations of the human condition. A visit to a jewellers allows a digression on love and love tokens. A vivid, sensual description of a street carnival becomes an insight into multiculturalism, and blends into a meditation on the nature of family. …

Ultimately, [Attlee] weaves together a subtle, understated tale of spiritual survival: peace and understanding come from an investigation of where we are. In an age in which air travel opens up the world, and holidays are to escape the mundane, Attlee encourages us to look at the riches on our doorstep.

Another piece about Attlee and Isolarion was published in the Oxford Times.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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Is it possible to travel without leaving home? Is there a way to be a pilgrim without leaving your life behind? James Attlee answers that question in this thoughtful, savvy, and personal account of his pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew—the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door. Isolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates an area in order to present it in detail, and that's what Attlee, sharp-eyed and armed with tape recorder and notebook, provides for Cowley Road. From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, Attlee investigates every aspect of the Cowley Road's appealingly eclectic culture, where halal shops abut craft jewelers and reggae clubs pulsate alongside quiet churchyards. Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Attlee is a charming and companionable guide who revels in the extraordinary embedded in the everyday.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
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Author James Attlee was interviewed by Danny Cox of BBC Radio Oxford on the occasion of the 2007 Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. Attlee discussed his book Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey. You can listen to archived audio (RealMedia format) of the interview.

In Isolarion Attlee delivers a thoughtful, streetwise, and personal account of his pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew—the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door. Though a lesser known local on Oxford's lower east side, Attlee reveals Cowley to be a thoroughly modern, impressively cosmopolitan, and utterly organic collection of shops, restaurants, pubs, and religious establishments teeming with life and reflecting the multicultural makeup of the surrounding neighborhood. In his interview Attlee expands on that notion by focusing on his account of the Cowley Road as a story not only about this quaint Oxford neighborhood, but a more universal tale of modern cities generally.

We have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Events | Literature
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In a review for last Sunday's Los Angeles Times, critic Susan Kandel praises Greg Bottoms' newest book The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art for its insightful exploration of the outermost fringes of the art world. Consisting of a series of revealing biographical portraits of some of America's most intriguing outsider artists, Kandel notes the intimacy with which Bottoms engages the peculiar personalities behind this one of a kind art. Kandel writes:

Economics, semantics and sociology percolate through Greg Bottoms' engaging and intermittently unnerving narrative… [But] despite the author's academic bona fides (he's an assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont) and his frequent nods to the likes of social anthropologist Clifford Geertz and writer Susan Sontag, his subject is personal. His "visionary" schizophrenic brother was imprisoned after trying to murder their family in a failed attempt at arson, leaving Bottoms caught in the long, twisting tentacles of mental illness. Less a scholar than a seeker and a witness, [Bottoms] finds unexpected kinship with the evangelical artists he encounters in a mind-bending road trip down South: the keepers of Finster's flame eking out a living at Paradise Gardens; William Thomas Thompson, a disabled ex-millionaire from South Carolina who painted a 300-foot mural of "The Book of Revelation," and Norbert Kox, a former member of the Outlaws biker gang living in rural Wisconsin and painting apocalyptic parables. Like them, Bottoms is impassioned, curious, relentless and angry, but never cynical, least of all about the power of creative expression to salve one's longings.

Weaving a narrative as powerful as the art of its subjects, Greg Bottoms The Colorful Apocalypse is a profound meditation on the chaos of despair and the ways in which creativity can help order our lives.

We have an interview with the author and an excerpt from the book.